Research, Writing, and Instruction by Geoffrey B. Elliott

Category: General

It has been three years since the first post to this webspace went up, three years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 596 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 597), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 17,411 views from 5,463 visitors. In the last year, therefore, I have made 121 posts and collected 1,774 views from 1,065 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the Second Year”). Performance seems to be down from last year (see the figures below), which I ascribe to teaching less; I have the sense that most of my viewership was students needing homework help, and I don’t have nearly so many of those at this point as I once did. I feel better about the quality of my work, though, so that much is to the good.

Figure 1: Posts per YearFigure 2: Views per YearFigure 3: Visitors per Year

My employment situation seems to have stabilized. I still work as contingent faculty, teaching classes at DeVry University in San Antonio as they are offered to me. Most of my working time is spent at the Hill Country Council on Alcohol & Drug Abuse, Inc., however, where I am a member of the full-time staff. It is a decent enough job, and one I am fortunate to have; I certainly had to struggle through enough to land it.

I also continue to work on my writing, as this webspace and others attest. Work on the Tales after Tolkien Society blog still presses on, and I get the occasional more formal piece put out where others can see it.

In a recent post, I write my lament about a game coming to an end. What I did not note in that post is that I lingered in that game long after my action in it was done, not just to distill out major notes from it (because I mean to play again, and in that same game-world if not with that very character), but to hold onto the magic of it just a little bit longer. And I was able to do that in some ways; there was a lovely question-and-answer exchange as the game wound down, and I appreciate the comments those left who told me that my part in the game made their play better. I have been more accustomed to receiving negative comment than positive (and I acknowledge that I have had many negative remarks coming), so to have learned that I have helped people enjoy themselves is a rare treat, and one I treasure. (Obviously, since I talk about it when it happens.)

I often do such things, hanging onto events as long as I can. When I have gone to conferences in the past, for example, I have usually been among the last to leave, staying on-site after the event has concluded, my footsteps echoing hollowly in the conference site. (This has been particularly true for me in my attendance at the International Congress on Medieval Studies; the event runs Thursday through Sunday, and I have typically not flown out until Monday morning. I’ve gotten to see a fair number of movies as a result, but still…) And attending the conferences themselves represent something of a hanging-on for me, since I know that I am not going to be a full-time member of academe at any point. Hell, I remember staying on the campus of my high school after my last bit of contest there and walking across the quiet golf course under the light of a full moon on a cloudless night–alone, the last to leave at nearly the last time I had to leave.

That I do so is a result of my fear of missing out on things. I am usually among the first to be on site for events, if not the first, and I know that I am prone to tiring before things are complete–but the ends of things are among the most fun parts, or so I am told. All of the interesting things happen as last call approaches, and I rarely make it so far into the night. But what usually happens is that I am left with an unsatisfying denouement; the climax happens, the action falls, and the resolution is that I am alone or nearly so as things end not with a bang but with a dwindling to nothing. I become witness to the attenuated ends of things, ends otherwise unmarked and whose comings, though heralded and known, are not valued.

It becomes hard not to be depressed by such things, especially since I can rarely if ever make the easy answer–leave earlier–happen for myself. But I am trying to do better. This year, for example, I’ll only be staying at the Congress for a couple of days, rather than the most-of-a-week I’ve done in the past. I can hope that it will help me to go out on a high note, Holst’s “Mars” rather than “Uranus.”

I have mentioned that I have been a fan of things at many points in my life, but far less so now than in the past. One of the things of which I have been a fan, and perhaps the closest I come to still being one, is the tabletop role-playing game, particularly Legend of the Five Rings (L5R) in its earlier incarnations. The game is one about which I have written before (notably here), and it is one with which I have been involved since the beginning of my undergraduate years–so for quite some time, now. I have a lot of good memories bound up in playing that game; I had a lot of good times at its tables, and I have made no few excellent friends from them (even if I am not nearly so good at keeping up with them as I ought to be–but that is wholly on me).

When a couple of those friends flagged to my attention a play-by-post L5R game using the older rules-set with which I am familiar, I jumped at the opportunity. It had been quite some time since I was able to take part in such a game, and longer since I was able to do so as a player, responsible only for my one character and her part of interacting with the world rather than for the whole rest of the world (because I have run many games, singly and as part of a team). And I think I did well enough at it; my character found her way into a slow-moving romance that worked out well, as well as distinguishing herself in interesting ways throughout the game, and I, as player, am told that I made the gaming experience better for the people with whom I played. I have to consider it a successful endeavor.

There is a problem, of course–the game ended.

Oh, it needed to do so. It was time. The story that the game was set to tell was told, and the side-stories that the players brought into the game and developed through it concluded–most of them well. There are seeds of more stories to come, of course, and the game itself is but one part of a sprawling narrative into which all of us who took part are, at least in theory, invited. (That I know the person who runs the overall project–and had him playing at my own table for quite a while–helps my chances, I think.) But, as with a good book or a good movie, the fact that the game has ended is something of a sadness. I grew to love the characters even as my character grew to love her peers–some more than others, and one in particular–and I will miss them and the people whose words gave them life on my computer screen and in my mind.

Having read many, many books, though, and seen no few movies, I think I am in position to say that the sense of loss is greater with the game than with those media. For, much as I love any one novel or poem, or as immersed as I get into any movie, or as thoroughly as I have explored the expanded intellectual properties that have emerged from no few of them, or as far into scholarship and study of any of them as I have gone, with none of them have I been as immersed in the narrative as I nearly always am in the RPG–L5R, in particular. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Daniel Mackay writes eloquently and at length about the phenomenon, as does Gary Alan Fine; I think they both have good points to make about the peculiarly interactive story-making of gaming communities and the bonds that form thereby.

Those bonds, more than anything else, I will miss. I can only hope that I can maintain some of them and forge yet more in the times to come.

On 18 December 2017, Coleen Flaherty’s “Where the Grass Is Greener” appeared in the online Inside Higher Ed. The article reports results from a Cornell working paper that suggest those who earned doctorates in humanities and social sciences and who left academia for non-academic non-profit work are more satisfied with their work than those who remain in academia–and, it seems, those who work in for-profit jobs. The study also seems to suggest that women in academia do not suffer from choosing to have children to so great a degree as has often been supposed. Flaherty presents opinions of several involved with and concerned with the Cornell study, as well, illuminating the work further and, ultimately, presenting an interesting read.

What Flaherty presents also corresponds with my own experience of such things. While I am not now and have never been a tenured or tenure-track faculty member–and have, indeed, given up on the idea of being so–I did complete a doctorate, and I did (and do) work in academe, but I do most of my work for a non-profit substance abuse treatment facility in the Texas Hill Country (as I have noted, I think). And I am in contact with no few of my former classmates and coworkers, many of whom are tenured or on the tenure track–and what they tend to share more or less publicly suggests that the life of the mind is far from the idyllic, indolent life many outside it believe it to be. At the same time, although I do face some problems in my current primary line of work, I find myself generally satisfied with my lot in life.

Why would I not be? I am paid by the hour, so that if I work more, I earn more. The job is inside work with no heavy lifting. I get paid holidays and leave time, and I am clearly on the side of good. My job helps people help people, and that has not always been the case with what I have done in the classroom. My skill-set is respected and appreciated, and I am able to deploy more of it than I was in the classroom or the research carrel–as well as deploying my specialized training in interesting ways. And, unlike the humanistic research I have done, I never have to wonder about whether or not my current work matters in people’s lives; I know that what I do and what I help make happen makes people’s lives better.

Yes, I know that my experience is idiosyncratic and anecdotal. Yes, I know that it cannot be taken as representative on its own. But I also know that enough such testimonies can be, and that adding mine to them, adding my small confirmation to the study Flaherty reports, helps enough such testimonies emerge that something might be done with them. And I know that I, at least, am better off working where I work than I might well be otherwise, and I am content with it.

It has been two years since the first post to this webspace went up, two years that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 475 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 476), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 15637 views from 4398 visitors. In the last year, therefore, I have made 311 posts and collected 3043 views from 1315 visitors (based on “Reflective Comments about the First Year“).

My employment situation continues to be odd. While I still teach, I do much less of it in the classroom now than I have done, and I am working mostly outside academia for reasons I have discussed previously. I do still remain engaged in some scholarship, though, having recently sent off an article for review and pressing on, albeit only haltingly and with difficulty, with the Tales after Tolkien Society.

I have also tried my hand at creative writing, notably in the Points of Departure and Pronghorn Project lines. They seem to have been decently received, but my employment situation has kept me from doing more with them for a while. Whether I’ll return to them or go on to other subjects entirely, I am not sure. Still, the experience has been good; I am glad to have had it.

I’ve been away from my usual routine, and I’m about to be away again (I head out to a conference next week). As such, I’ve not been able to keep up as I might like. But I am working to get things back on track, I assure you. I should have things back together soon.

It has been a year since the first post to this webspace went up, a year that I have been working on Elliott RWI. As I write this, I have made 164 posts to the blogroll (this will be post 165), and I have posted many individual pages, collecting 12594 views from 3083 visitors. I have also gone from having full-time employment at a Big-12 university and other work to searching for regular work while taking care of no few freelance projects. There are developments in that line, so things are proceeding well enough, but I cannot say I would not like to have something a bit more stable than I currently have.

Despite the changes to my professional circumstances, however, I have every intention of continuing my efforts on this website and the projects it represents. The Fedwren Project continues to be of interest to me, as do any number of other endeavors that may well begin to appear in this webspace in the days to come. So do please keep coming back here; the month-long hiatus is done, and I have things to add to this webspace that I think will be worth the attention.

In my first post to this webspace, I noted a desire for this website to do a number of things: host research projects, connect to writing samples, offer course materials, and maintain a professional portfolio. It is doing that, but I thought I might make it a bit easier to navigate. (There is a navigation menu at the top of the page, but not everyone seems to find it amenable to use.) So, if you are looking for

I have for some time been working on revising my teaching philosophy from an earlier statement sent out as part of the many job applications I have written since 2012. Some months ago, I stumbled into a brief version of the text appearing below (the first two paragraphs), and I have been using it since. It did not seem to me to be enough, however; the brief version does not address the teaching I have done inside and outside the classroom. Hence the version appearing below.

I will doubtlessly return to it in the future, of course. As I teach more classes, I will have additional paragraphs to write. As I teach more of the same classes and work with more tutees, my attitudes and techniques will change, and the text will need to change to reflect those changes.

My experience of higher education and life following it has not been unlike what Donna Dunbar-Odom describes in Defying the Odds. Both of my parents attended college without completing it; my father has worked in building trades throughout my life, and my mother (who has since returned to college) has worked in grocery stores and tax offices for as long as I can remember. They prize education, and they encouraged me to pursue it, but they do so and did so out of the belief that education leads to better jobs—that is jobs with less manual labor and higher pay than theirs. When I went to college, therefore, I went under the burden of ignorance Gerald Graff describes in his 2007 Profession piece, “Our Undemocratic Curriculum.” I did not have the kinds of connections that allowed me prior knowledge of what college would be like, and I made them only belatedly and with much difficulty. The burden shifted again when I went to graduate school and was necessarily more immersed in the political life of my home department; I had not the background to be able to negotiate office politics, coming from a home where work was less about relations with coworkers and more about relations with customers and physical manipulation of materials. It shifted again when I entered the academic workforce more fully, and with the shift, I found myself again off-balance, not entirely sure what I should be doing or how it ought to be done.

Many of the students I have taught have been in similar situations. Some have been the first in their families to attend college, or if they are not, they have been the first to have a chance at completing it. Many have been immigrants or the children of immigrants, struggling to negotiate the demands of cultures and languages not yet their own in the hopes of somehow making things better, even if they are unsure what that “better” can be. They have been pushed to go to college by the credentialing demands of the workforce, and they are constrained to enter the workforce because of the financial burden increasingly imposed by college study, so that a self-reinforcing cycle develops. Problems accrue to such a vision of education, of course; it tends to the collapsing of the intellectual endeavor to mechanistic task-completion and the reconceptualization of the instructor at any level as an automaton—a teacher-bot, as I recall quipping at one point, churning out replaceable student-cogs to maintain the devices of current productivity culture. But even in such a reductivist vision, there are unfamiliar demands made upon students but seldom or never clarified, rarely if ever made explicit. As I have completed a long course of formal study and reflected at great length on the many mistakes I made in doing so, I entertain the conceit that I have some idea of how to negotiate those demands. Conveying that understanding is no less important than conveying the content knowledge and thought-models of my courses; it does much to inform the mindsets of the disciplines I study and teach. Increasingly, I am called to pass along what I have learned about the academic environment in the hope that others will have an easier time making their own transitions and negotiating the tensions between the collegiate enterprise and their backgrounds.

How I answer the call depends in large part on the kind of class I teach. For college-preparatory and developmental coursework (and I resist the term “remedial” as indicating there is something wrong with the students in the class; they need to learn, certainly, but so do we all), in which students enroll who have been academically underserved or who have been away from schooling for many years, much opportunity to do so presents itself. Providing materials that treat the history and development of educational structures and patterns as the samples from which the students in college-preparatory courses develop their interpretive skills not only offers them the practice in reading and writing which such courses typically expect, but also offers them access to the context in which those expectations are developed and to understanding the structures to the service of which those expectations are directed. Each is something to be valued and prized, and each is something that the students I have taught in such classes have indicated appreciating. Improving not only the skills themselves but also the understanding and awareness of the contexts in which those skills are developed helps the students in college-preparatory classes develop agency with their own academic endeavors, increasing their chances of later success in their formal educations and in their lives afterwards. Passing along what I know helps them.

In first-year courses, such as the composition courses that can serve as synecdoche for the collegiate experience (per Timothy L. Carens in a 2010 College English piece, “Serpents in the Garden: English Professors in Contemporary Film and Television”) or the public speaking courses that inform no few majors, some opportunities similar to those developmental courses present emerge. In them, I can still present materials explicitly treating the history and development of academia, with much the same benefits for first-year students as for their more junior peers. That the students in such classes are presumed to be more familiar with the traditions of academia than their more junior peers offers the opportunity for such classes to more deeply explore those traditions and to interrogate them, questioning their emergence and endurance and arguing for their maintenance, adjustment, or elimination. I encourage that exploration through focusing series of writing assignments in such classes on issues of the students’ curricula, interrogating the standards that are in place and the reasons for them. Students are given more agency in their educations thereby, helping them not only to have better understandings of the structures into which they are entering but also to have more perception of authority to question and, at need, push back against those structures. My own lessons in the ability and need to resist and struggle against seemingly evident and inflexible demands were not entirely comfortable. While my classrooms may become sites of the discomfort associated with the development of new understanding, they are so only insofar as they serve to help students learn to negotiate the tensions of their backgrounds and academic establishments where they suffer minimal or no consequence for errors made in the course of that learning—something I did not have and so am called to offer to my students in turn.

In literature surveys, commonly offered at the sophomore level, answering the call to convey what I know of the academic environment is somewhat eased by the nature of the courses themselves. Many such courses concern themselves with putting across a sense of canonical works of writing, rightly or wrongly seeking to offer guiding ideas of what literature has been and can be. General literature surveys, taught under such titles as “Introduction to Literature,” often seek to ground students in basic literary criticism and close reading, working within traditional conceptions of the overarching genres of prose, poetry, and drama. Period- and nation-specific surveys taught under such names as “Survey of British Literature I” and “American Literature” often frame themselves as presenting the “great” works of their times’ or countries’ writings—usually chronologically in an attempt to portray an overall narrative of development and improvement. Genre- and sub-genre-specific courses such as surveys of poetry or introductions to fantasy literature function similarly, laying out what purport to be representative groups of works to foster fundamental understandings of what the (sub-) genres are. While there are fraught questions surrounding canonicity, and engaging them is vital, there is some value in presenting and informing a common frame of reference; if nothing else, the “great” works receive much attention and inform references, so that unfamiliarity with them hinders understanding of other writings yet. Consequently, teaching such classes presents me an opportunity to explicitly engage with presumptions of common understandings and the fulfillment of them, as well as the ethical questions associated with such presumptions; I can use the works of literature and the anthologies in which they typically appear as means to express at least some of the major cultural underpinnings of the academic world in which students work.

In more advanced writing classes, such as technical writing and advanced exposition, fewer overt opportunities to answer the call to convey useful information about how to negotiate backgrounds and the collegiate enterprise present themselves. Students in such classes are years into their collegiate careers, already steeped in understandings of how higher education works—at least at the undergraduate level. Many in such classes, however, are considering graduate school, the experience of which is wholly different from the undergraduate. In many senses, in fact, students who come from backgrounds like mine are more familiar with the kinds of demands graduate school makes than are many others; the mentor-mentee relationship at work for those pursuing masters and doctoral degrees is not unlike the apprenticeship model still prevalent in many building trades and skilled crafts. Pointing out such similarities to students has proven illuminating for many I have taught, helping some to approach their applications for graduate and professional education with better understandings and greater awareness of the rhetorical situations involved. Others, who mean to enter professions rather than continuing their formal education, perhaps benefit less directly from the comparison, but the realization of the similar contexts at work between higher levels of higher education and the working world so often considered in opposition to academia does help them to transition forward from their formal educations—and many have younger siblings who might benefit from the advice, in turn.

In private tutorial work, whether directed towards non-native speakers of English working on graduate degrees or former classroom students seeking to advance their writing and research careers, how I answer the call to address the structures of academia varies. With one tutee, one completing a doctorate and moving both into conferencing and onto the job market, I did much to relate my own experience in both arenas, not only reviewing scholarship and CV, but also noting potential problems and complications of conference presentations and job interviews. The tutee was commended at several conferences and was able to secure a faculty appointment, suggesting the value of the advice given for negotiating expectations formed from a life overseas and the demands of another aspect of the collegiate environment. Another tutee sought help adapting a paper written for a literature class I taught for presentation at an international conference—something with which the tutee, coming from a rural working-class background, was unfamiliar but at which the tutee ultimately succeeded. That tutee has since worked to write papers independently, immersing himself in an aspect of the academic environment for which his familial background offers no precedent and bespeaking a successful negotiation of the tensions between upbringing and acculturation; it is something I seek to continue doing for others as I continue to teach.

How I will answer the call to pass on what I know of the academic environment to those who seek to enter it from backgrounds that have not exposed them to it as much as others in other situations yet is unclear to me; I have not yet encountered them, so I cannot speak to them. I can, however, reassert that I will work to answer that call throughout my teaching, and that I will do so in such a way as works against a mechanistic view of education and towards one that embodies and pushes forward a love of learning I have found to be sustaining for many years.

This statement was updated 13 March 2016. The update refined treatment of first-year composition classes.

I have for some time maintained online teaching materials, and I have every intention of continuing to do so. I do, however, feel that I need to do more with my professional online presence than simply write reports of classroom activities and maintain course materials; I do more than teach, and that “more” needs representation. Hence the shift to a WordPress site from the previous materials and the reorganization of my professional online presence as Elliott Research, Writing, and Instruction–Elliott RWI.

Initial plans for the site include

Hosting research projects that further my research agenda and can serve as examples for students, scholars, and potential employers

Presenting and/or linking to writing endeavors I have had and continue to pursue

Providing course materials and class reports for the benefit of students enrolled in the classes I teach and for those I tutor privately (as well as linking to the agency through which I conduct tutoring)

Maintaining a professional online presence and portfolio

Other materials may accumulate as time passes, and the site may reorganize from time to time. For now, though, it seems this will be a decent beginning.